Tories looked like they were keeping ‘different books’ on F-35s, one internal, one for public: Kevin Page

Kevin Page on F-35s: Tories looked like they were keeping 'different books,' one internal, one for public

OTTAWA — Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page said during a radio show Saturday that it looked like the government was keeping “different books” on F-35 budgeting — one for public consumption and another for internal planning.

Still, he said during an an interview on CBC Radio’s The House that he didn’t do “victory laps” after the recent auditor general’s report seemed to vindicate projections he had previously made about the government plan to buy F-35 fighter jets.

In March 2011, Page said government projections of about $15 billion for the jets were underestimating the true expenditure by around half.

He was harshly criticized by many within the Harper government at the time, but his views were at least partially echoed by Auditor General Michael Ferguson in a report earlier this month that showed the government underestimated the cost by $10 billion.

“We’re happy that the AG did great work, and now we can see we’re having a debate going forward around a financial framework that makes sense to financial people,” Page said during the radio show.

However, he added: “We didn’t do any victory laps or anything like that in the office. For us, it’s like we’re doing our jobs. . . . I think the thing that bothers us a little bit is you do get the sense there were different books. . . . It looked like (the government was) lowballing.”

The government has said differences in the F-35 estimates come down to what’s included. It says its publicly stated figures have included costs for acquisition and additional maintenance, and not things such as pilot salaries and fuel, which account for the higher projections.

During the show, Page reiterated some of the points made days earlier in a House of Commons finance committee meeting about government budget cuts. Page has said government plans to reduce operational spending by $5.2 billion over the next three years will ultimately result in 108,000 job losses in both the private and public sectors.

Page said he simply used the formula the government used to determine the effect of its stimulus spending in 2009 when the country was in recession, but calculated the impact of reduced expenditures instead.

Conservative MP James Rajotte, chairman of the House of Commons finance committee, later spoke on The House, and said the same mathematics applied to stimulus spending doesn’t necessarily work to determine the effect of budget reductions.

“The fact is when you come out of recession, you expect private-sector employment to take over, which is exactly what’s happening,” he said, pointing to the most recent national employment figures that showed an additional 82,300 people were working in March, with the unemployment rate falling to 7.2 per cent from 7.4 per cent.